


Space

by pigeonking



Series: The Missing Doctor Adventures - Season One [10]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-22
Updated: 2017-03-22
Packaged: 2018-10-09 07:32:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10407039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pigeonking/pseuds/pigeonking
Summary: This was my attempt at a little two-hander that only features the two main leads...





	

Clover zipped up the front of her red catsuit as she entered the control room.

The Doctor was busy at the console, the rotor in the middle rising and falling to indicate that they were still in flight.

“Ah, you’re awake!” the Doctor beamed as he noticed her enter.

“You should have woken me instead of sneaking off and leaving me in bed!” she rebuked gently, but there was no real anger behind her words.

“You looked so peaceful!” the Doctor told her apologetically. “And we have been careening from one adventure into another lately! You may have forgotten that we live in a time machine where we have no sense of the passing of time and no real concept of night and day. You need to snatch your moments of rest when you can get them!”

“Well thank you for thinking of me!” Clover wrapped her arms around him from behind and kissed his cheek. “It was very sweet of you.”

She reached down and caressed the Doctor’s crotch suggestively.

“Do you think we’ve got time for a quick one before the TARDIS lands again?” she asked coyly.

As if in answer to her question the familiar howling and grinding of the TARDIS engines filled the air and the rotor in the centre of the console ground to a halt.

“Oh pooh!” Clover cursed emphatically.

The Doctor operated the scanner to look outside whilst trying not to be distracted by Clover.

“Ooh a space ship!” he enthused as the scanner was filled by a metallic looking corridor. “Have we done one of those yet?”

“Does doing it in the TARDIS count?” Clover asked, her hand still a little busy.

“You know I wasn’t talking about that!” the Doctor remarked in a pitch that was slightly higher than he intended. “Do you ever think about anything else?” he teased.

“Are we going to go out and explore then?” Clover wondered.

The Doctor was driven to distraction by Clover’s little… distraction; he turned around and kissed her.

“In a minute.” He said.

 

Ten minutes later the TARDIS doors opened and the Doctor and Clover staggered out looking a little red faced and breathless.

“Right, yes… space ship! Off we go!” the Doctor blustered as he closed the door behind him and took Clover by the hand.

“Isn’t it funny how no one has come to investigate the strange temporal anomaly in their space ship?” Clover wondered. “We’ve been here ten minutes. You’d assume that we’ve been detected.”

“Maybe they’ve got other things on their plate at the moment.” The Doctor suggested. “Something a little more pressing than two randy time travellers, eh?” He winked.

It was then that the lights began to flash red, on and off intermittently. An electronic voice blared out from unseen speakers.

“Red Alert! Red Alert! This ship is under attack!” it repeated on a loop.

“Red alert?” the Doctor enthused. “Looks like we might be in time for some dancing!”

“Dancing?” Clover looked at him quizzically.

“Unless this is an Earth ship of course; then it means we’re all in deadly danger!” the Doctor admitted.

“Ship is under attack.” Clover said. “Sounds like deadly danger to me!”

“Then let’s go and offer our services shall we?” he suggested.

“Let’s!” Clover agreed.

They ran.

 

They were running for about five minutes without meeting a single living soul on the ship when everything around them began to shake violently and the hull started to buckle dangerously.

The Doctor and Clover held out their hands to steady themselves, but were alarmed when a massive crack began to appear in the metal of the hull not too far away from them. There was a porthole nearby which a quick glance through told them that on the other side was nothing, but space.

“I don’t see any sign of what’s attacking us, do you?” the Doctor remarked.

The ship shook again and the rent got wider as if to assure the Doctor that the attacker was certainly there even if it couldn’t be seen.

“One more tremor like that and that crack will split the hull open and we’ll be sucked out into space!” the Doctor noted urgently.

“Then we’d best get out of this corridor fast!” Clover urged.

There was a door ahead that looked like it opened into an airlock.

“In there quick!” the Doctor suggested.

He and Clover dashed to the door and made it through just before the predicted third tremor occurred.

The ship shook again as the Doctor slammed the heavy metal door shut behind them and the shriek of tearing metal was clearly audible.

The room was indeed an airlock and there was a rack of spacesuits along the left hand wall.

“We should probably put one of those on!” the Doctor said. “We might be needing one soon enough.”

“This ship has been set to self-destruct!” the electronic voice suddenly began to announce. “Five minutes until detonation!” The voice began to repeat this message.

Clover and the Doctor began to pull themselves into a spacesuit each.

“Five minutes isn’t an awful lot of time!” Clover complained.

“Perhaps that’s all the time the crew needs to reach their escape pods?” the Doctor pondered.

“Four minutes until detonation!” the voice declared helpfully and the Doctor and Clover sped up their actions.

By the time the announcement had reached “Two minutes until detonation!” the two time travellers had succeeded in sealing themselves securely within their space suits.

“What now?” Clover wondered. “Should we try and make it back to the TARDIS?”

“No time.” The Doctor answered. “We should try and get out of this airlock and as far away from the ship as possible before it blows up!”

The Doctor began working on the airlock door.

“What about the TARDIS?” Clover asked.

“She’ll be fine.” The Doctor assured her. “She’ll be able to survive the explosion and we can spacewalk to her once everything has settled.”

The airlock door came open and together the Doctor and Clover drifted, hand in hand, out into space.

They both pressed their feet against the outer hull of the ship and pushed off as hard as they could to propel themselves away from the blast zone as far as possible.

The pair shot through space like two stones from the same slingshot. As they sped away from the doomed vessel they turned around so that they could try to see what exactly had been attacking the ship. What they saw astounded them both.

They saw a metallic spherical object spiralling away from the ship in one direction; this had to be the escape pod, but it was the creature that had its tentacles wrapped around the stricken vessel that amazed them.

The Doctor and Clover glimpsed a mottled purple hide with many serpentine tendrils entangled around the hull of the Earth ship and slowly crushing it like an egg. No less than six large eyes with fiery red irises encircled its conical head… and then the ship exploded silently in a ball of flame that engulfed the creature entirely.

The Doctor and Clover shielded their eyes from the glare of the explosion and had to curl up into defensive balls in order to avoid being hit by debris from either the ship or the creature.

After a few moments it was safe for them to look and to uncurl from their defensive balls.

They were surrounded by ragged and charred bits of metal that had once been the Earth ship along with smatterings of roasted creature. Somewhere among this lot lay the TARDIS.

“What was that thing, Doctor?” Clover asked.

“You’ve heard of Space Whales, right?” he said. “Well that, my dear, was a Space Kraken!”

“Well I’m glad that it’s dead now!” Clover replied emphatically.

Off in the distance the spiralling escape pod was just still visible. They’d had a lucky escape.

What had been supposedly empty space blurred and changed colour, resolving itself into the writhing mass of a second Kraken.

“Yes, I’d forgotten about that!” the Doctor murmured. “Space Krakens mate for life and always travel in pairs. She is not going to be happy that her mate is dead!”

The second Kraken ensnared the escape pod within its tentacles. With one twist it opened up the pod like a can of monkey nuts and with its remaining tendrils it plucked out the occupants one by one and popped them into the cavernous tooth-filled maw that awaited beneath the tentacle mass.

“Oh my God!” Clover exclaimed in horror. “They didn’t stand a chance!”

“Neither will we if that thing catches us!” the Doctor remarked grimly. “We need to find the TARDIS and fast!”

They began to ‘swim’ through the vacuum of space pushing themselves along with arm and leg movements that were akin to performing the breast stroke in water.

“How much oxygen do you think we have in these suits?” Clover wondered.

“There should be a gage on the wrist of your left gauntlet that will tell you.” The Doctor instructed.

Clover glanced at the gage on her wrist as indicated.

“Well we don’t have to worry about suffocating to death for at least six hours!” she told the Doctor chirpily.

“Unfortunately, if we don’t find the TARDIS soon, suffocating to death will be the least of our worries!” the Doctor replied.

He glanced over at the Kraken and saw that she had finished her meal and had discarded the two halves of escape pod, which were now drifting away from her. She didn’t seem to have noticed them… yet.

The two time travellers made it to a large chunk of space ship debris and hugged themselves to it as a means of cover whilst they plotted their next move.

“If we wait here long enough maybe she will just go away?” Clover hoped.

The Doctor peered over the top of their piece of debris. The look on his face through the visor of his helmet when he popped back down again was not encouraging.

“No such luck!” he said almost apologetically. “She’s heading this way!”

“Has she seen us?” Clover asked desperately.

“I don’t think so.” The Doctor replied. “I think she’s just coming to inspect the wreckage for more morsels to snack on.”

“Morsels like us, you mean!” an edge of panic was starting to catch in Clover’s voice. “Do you think she can smell us?”

“How am I supposed to know!” the Doctor protested. “My knowledge of Space Krakens is based on my memories of the previous Doctors and he didn’t exactly get his knowledge by dedicating his life to studying them in their natural environment like some sort of inter-galactic David Attenborough! He never even met one! Just read about them one time in a book and that was a fiction book as well!”

“Well that’s one thing you can say you’ve experienced that he hasn’t!” Clover replied with sarcasm tainted by hysteria.

“I feel so much better for that, believe me!” the Doctor retorted with equal sarcasm. “As I’m being eaten I’ll try to remember how lucky and privileged I am to be in this unique situation!”

“So what are we gonna do?” Clover asked.

“All we can do is keep moving from cover to cover as quickly as we can, hoping that we can stay one step ahead of our Space Kraken and that we can find the TARDIS before she finds us!” the Doctor replied.

“What are we waiting for!” Clover declared with false enthusiasm.

“That’s the spirit!” the Doctor grinned.

They broke cover and began to ‘swim’ to the next nearest piece of debris.

The Doctor chanced a look over his shoulder – which was hard enough to do inside the spacesuit – and saw that the Kraken was sifting through some of the wreckage in its search for more food.

One of its eyes was fixed upon the retreating forms of him and Clover.

“It‘s seen us!” the Doctor exclaimed with an edge of panic.

But then his eye fell upon something just passed the right flank of the Kraken, no doubt uncovered during the creature’s meticulous scrutiny of the debris.

“The TARDIS!” the Doctor’s panic was overpowered by jubilation.

Clover rotated her body slowly within the vacuum and saw where the Doctor was pointing.

She was overcome by one part joy mixed in with a liberal dosage of blind fear.

The sanctuary of the TARDIS was in sight, but the titanic bulk of the Kraken was between them and it, and to make matters worse the Kraken was now heading straight for them. The TARDIS might as well have been on the other side of a piranha infested river, which as analogies went wasn’t too far away from the reality.

“What are we going to do?” Clover wondered in desperation.

“You go left and I’ll go right!” the Doctor instructed. “It can’t come after both of us. Whoever it doesn’t go after will have to get to the TARDIS and find some way of saving whoever it decides to go after!”

“That’s it?” Clover shrieked hysterically. “That’s your plan?”

“Have you got a better one?” the Doctor countered with as much patience as he could muster under the circumstances.

Clover had to concede that she didn’t. And so she ‘swam’ off to the left as quickly as her limbs would propel her.

As she was the first to move off the Kraken’s attention was immediately fixated upon her and she began to steer her gargantuan form in pursuit of Clover’s retreating figure.

There were fleshy fan like appendages at either side of her head that allowed the Kraken to fly through the vacuum like a giant grotesque tentacle-bird. The movement was not quick, but it would only be a matter of time before she caught Clover.

The Doctor propelled himself forward as quickly as he could. The sooner he reached the TARDIS the better!

He passed the flank of the Kraken so closely that he could have reached out and touched her had he desired to do so. Right now reaching the TARDIS and saving Clover were the foremost thoughts in his mind.

The rectangular blue police box was drifting end over end through space heading away from the Doctor. His frantic paddling with his arms and legs did not appear to be making him go any faster.

“What I wouldn’t give for a good old rocket pack right now!” he lamented as he crawled inch by inch towards his gradually receding time machine.

Meanwhile Clover had turned herself around so that she could see the Kraken coming after her. The mass of tentacles practically filled her vision and she was back pedalling through the vacuum like her life depended on it… which it did. Then she caught sight of the mouth among those writhing tendrils and she was reminded of the saw-toothed waste disposal unit that was barely visible down the sink plughole in the kitchen back at the house on Allen Road. She had no desire to be caught in that!

Retreating like this it was only a matter of time before the Kraken caught her. If only she could find some way around the creature… or over it?

“What I wouldn’t give for a rocket pack right now!” she lamented.  

Her mind flashed back to when she and the Doctor had watched Spider-Man 2 on DVD back at the house on Earth, and the big fight scene on top of the train between Spidey and Doctor Octopus.

Granted, the Kraken had a lot more tentacles than Doc Ock, but in space she was weightless and almost as acrobatic as the web-head himself. Could she get passed those arms without being snagged?

There was only one way to find out.

Clover chanced a look behind her and found that she was backing up against a sizeable chunk of twisted and broken metal. Her feet connected with it and she pushed herself off with all her strength and launched into a somersault towards the encroaching Kraken.

The tentacles seemed to stretch and elongate like elastic as they reached for her, but Clover saw them coming and was able to twist her body to avoid being snagged. One tendril came dangerously close to encircling her ankle, but she kicked out with the foot and knocked the writhing limb away.

And then Clover was soaring clear of the tentacles and over the back of the creature. For one moment her eyes met with one of the Kraken’s huge staring orbs and then she was clear and she was whooping and laughing with joy at having succeeded in eluding the terrible creature.

“Clover Daniels is not on the menu tonight!” she squealed in delight.

And then she felt one of the tentacles tighten around her midriff and suddenly she was being pulled backwards.

 

The Doctor was inches from the TARDIS. He stretched out his arms as the distance grew shorter and he grabbed at the door handle. Of course it was locked. He reached for his key.

“Damn!” he cursed as he realised that he could not reach into his pockets because of the spacesuit.

Frantically he began to claw and tear at the fabric of the suit so that he could get at his pockets within. Once the protective material was breached his air would leak out and he would be exposed to the natural background radiation of space, but it would only be for a few seconds… minutes at most. He didn’t have any choice… he had to get that key and get into the TARDIS!

 

Clover struggled hard against the tentacle wrapped around her waist, punching and clawing at it with manic desperation, but nothing she did seemed to affect the rubbery appendage and if anything its grip just seemed to tighten further still. Then she saw the cavernous saw-toothed waste disposal mouth and that just made her fight harder.

“Let me go you tentacled fucker you! I promise you I’ll stick so far down your throat that you’ll choke before you get to digest me! Let me go!!!” she was screaming with violent vehemence.

The tentacle continued to draw her in slowly and inexorably, indifferent to Clover’s threats and struggles.

Clover closed her eyes as that mouth got closer and closer. She didn’t want to see it coming.

“Doctor, I love you!” she screamed at the top of her voice.

This was it, here it comes…

There was no excruciating pain. Was that a floor she could feel beneath her feet or wishful thinking?

Clover slowly opened her eyes and saw the Doctor looking at her over the top of the TARDIS console, the rotor was moving up and down merrily to indicate that they were once more in flight. He was smiling and he no longer wore his space helmet. There was a sizeable tear in the side of his spacesuit.

Clover looked down at her midriff and saw that the tentacle was still wrapped around her limply, but the Kraken was no longer attached to it. She quickly unwrapped it from around her and let it drop to the floor. Then she tore off her helmet and ran to the Doctor and embraced him.

They kissed long and deep and passionately.

Clover broke off and looked him in the eyes.

“Thank you does not even begin to cover it!” she told him emphatically.

“You’re welcome.” He replied with a sardonic smile, but it quickly gave way to a frown and his look became distant as his mind wandered elsewhere.

“What’s wrong?” Clover asked him.

“If we had left the TARDIS as soon as we’d landed instead of… lingering… then we might have been able to help those people to escape the Krakens.” The Doctor explained to her.

“You don’t know that!” Clover tried to reassure him.

“No, I don’t know that, but the possibility still exists.” The Doctor replied.

“So what?” Clover asked and she disentangled herself from the Doctor’s arms. “No more sex after the TARDIS has landed?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” the Doctor snapped. “How could we have known what was waiting for us outside the TARDIS?”

“Exactly!” Clover agreed.

“I mean, if we had gone out earlier then maybe we just would have ended up joining their fate!” the Doctor added.

“There are no easy answers, Doctor.” Clover told him. “I wish we could have helped those people too, but it’s not our fault they’re dead.”

“Isn’t it?” the Doctor replied grimly. “I’m not so sure about that.”

 

**The End**


End file.
